


Impossibilities

by Kalya_Lee



Series: All The Days That Never Came [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amy and Rory do the Impossible Girl arc, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Identity Crises
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 15:01:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4105180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kalya_Lee/pseuds/Kalya_Lee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You’re beautiful,” breathes Rory, and Amy laughs.<br/>“Shut up,” she says, “you can’t really see me.”</p><p>Rory has always loved his Impossible Girl.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my incredible beta, DaraOakwise, who has been an amazing sounding board, an endless fount of ideas and all-around the best motivator I could ever have asked for. She's done her best to cure me of my comma fetish, so any errors are entirely mine. :)

He is five years old when he meets her, the first time, crouching low in the cream-carpeted corner of his classroom, knobby knees poking out of his shorts. He stares down at them,miserable, wishing he could cover them up – they’re little, like him, and pale, also like him, and like him again they wobble a bit, awkwardly.

A shadow falls across his corner, and he looks up. The first thing he sees is knees, but they’re Adult Knees, strong and brave and good for hiding behind, and they don’t wobble. At all.

“Hello,” says the owner of the knees, crouching down beside him, “you’re a quiet one, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

“Rory,” whispers Rory, blinking. The lady in front of him is _bright_ , with sharp features and laughing eyes and red hair and _freckles_. He wonders what she’s doing, talking to him.

“Well, nice to meet you, Rory,” says the lady, and she reaches out a hand for him to _shake_ , like he’s a real grown up instead of just a kid with crippling shyness and wobbly knees. “What’re you doing over here all by yourself?”

Rory peers over the lady’s shoulder. Kids are giggling, rolling on the carpet, running in circles in some bizarre game of tag. Two girls are sitting over on the alphabet mat, playing some sort of hand-clapping game. A big-looking boy is busy poking another, smaller boy in the shoulder. The pokee lets him, with a slightly bemused smile, and seems to be somewhat enjoying it.

Rory looks at the other children, all movement and noise, then at the lady’s bright, happy eyes, and shuffles a little further back into the corner. “I don’t belong here,” he mutters, finally, wretchedly. He looks down, again, at his knees, and he means it.

The lady leans closer, and she smiles, wide and sparkling as the sun. “Let me tell you a secret, Rory,” she says, and suddenly he notices how red her hair is, like fire or autumn leaves, how it stands out against the classroom’s muted pastel-and-cream. How strong she seems, how real in this watery kindergarten world, and how her voice is like a song, her accent broad and lilting and so very _Scottish_ in this very English village. “Neither do I.”

If you ask him, later, when he’s grown and adult himself, when he’s gotten over his shyness and wobbling and crippling fear of bare knees, if you make him pick a moment, he’ll think back to this one and say, _yes, I suppose this is it_.

Five-year-olds don’t fall in love, but Rory does.

***

Miss Jessica Pond is his teacher for a year, guiding him through reading and ‘rithmetic and the rocky politics of pre-school. She gets him out of his corner, eventually, and tweaks his nose every so often, playfully, until he almost isn’t embarrassed of it anymore. She laughs at his feeble five-year-old jokes, and her laugh is loud and open and shiny, like a penny glimmering in the sun. Her anger is like the rage of a storm, and the bullies, especially _his_ bullies, are cowed into submission by the end of the first week.

She is, to Rory, a dragonslaying knight in a long scarf and short skirt, which is to say _amazing_ , and she always marks his spelling papers with a smiley face, which is almost better.

(He keeps every one, in a shoebox under his bed. Fifteen years later, he still has them, but he’ll never admit it to anyone.)

He cries when the year ends and he has to leave her class. She kisses himgently on the forehead, and tells him not to be a baby, he’s her hero, remember, her brave strong Rory. He smiles at that, and it's a little forced and still a bit wobbly, but she smiles back so it’s good enough for him.

When he gets the news, midway through the summer holidays, that Miss Jessica Pond has passed away, tragically, at the age of twenty-three – car crash, a freak accident, how horrible, what _is_ the world coming to nowadays? – he screams into his pillow, just once.

His parents will never find out that he knows. They never meant to tell him, after all, never meant for him to overhear, and he never cries about it, in front of them.

He keeps smiling instead, as he knows she would’ve wanted him to.

***

When Rory is fifteen, he falls in with the wrong crowd. This is probably less to do with his own nascent teenage rebellion than with the fact that his delinquent sort-of-friends seem to have adopted him, all of a sudden and with great enthusiasm, and he has neither the heart nor the guts to tell them to go away.

Their choice to do so, he suspects, is less to do with his inherent coolness than with the fact that he is Mostly Harmless, owns a nice bike for getaways and is fun to corrupt, but he figures he can live with that.

Rory has always prided himself with living with things. He’s discovered, over the years, that if he can’t be bold and brash, being unfazeable is the next best thing, and it’s probably the best he can aspire to anyway. He’s learned to put up with his mother’s fussing, with his dad’s insistence on teaching him to change bulbs and carry a trowel everywhere, with his lanky legs that don’t seem to have grown any less knobby since he was five, and with any other crap life unceremoniously hurls in his general direction.

Including being handed a fag, which is, smell-wise, not something he’s too fond of and, term-wise, not something he’s quite comfortable with and, legality wise, not something he’s comfortable with at _all_ , especially since the boy who handed it to him seems to have suddenly and completely disappeared.

“Don’t tell me,” says a dry, distinctly Scottish voice from somewhere behind him, “you’re holding it for a friend.”

“Er,” says Rory, with typical eloquence, whirling around. “Yes I am, actually.”

The woman who spoke is _gorgeous_ , by fifteen-year-old standards at least. Her waist is tiny and her features are delicate and her _legs_ , you could build temples to those legs. You could build _monuments_.

This isn’t, however, Rory’s first impression of her. His first impression is of a (very short) black skirt and a black-and-white chequered vest and a bowler hat with a chequered stripe, followed very quickly by _oh shit, a copper_.

“You,” she says, in a Copper Voice, “what’s your name?”

“Er,” says Rory, again. “Rory Williams. Er. Ma’am.”

“Rory Williams,” says the cop, ponderously, as if she’s tasting it, trying it out for size. “You can’t be more than – what are you, fifteen? What kind of lousy friends do you have, exactly?”

“Well,” Rory says, and realizes that he doesn’t really have an answer and then, with a horrible sinking feeling, that he really _does_ : “They’re not, well. They’re not really my friends.” And then, because he is always honest to police and can never lie around pretty girls:“I don’t really have friends.”

The copper peers at him, as if studying him, learning him, judging him. “I don’t see why,” she says, finally, matter-of-factly. “You seem like fun. Strong. Brave. Kind of sweet.” Her eyes narrow, just slightly, and then she smiles, like she’s decided, and it lights up her face. It lights up the entire _street_. “You are sweet, aren’t you, Brave Strong Rory?”

Rory starts, unsettled, and then realizes that she’s teasing. Him. Teasing _him_. He hasn’t been teased, teased _properly_ , not cruelly or as a prelude to stealing  his trousers, in what feels like all his teenaged life.

“I, um,” he says, trying to smile. He desperately wants to smile. “I could be.”

The copper beams, and Rory feels his soul catch on fire. “Good,” she says, plucking the cigarette from his fingers. “You do that, yeah? Leave the loneliness and the swashbuckling to the likes of me.”

Rory stares at this beautiful woman, with her miles of leg and flaming hair and confident, authoritative, _dazzling_ smile, and decides that yes, he’ll leave the swashbuckling to her. He’ll leave anything, do anything, really, if she asked. He _would_.

“Get yourself some proper friends, while you’re at it,” she adds, and he thinks, _I could do that too_. And then she winks and she turns and she leaves, flicking his damning cigarette into a bin as she goes.  


And when she’s halfway down the street and she turns and grins at him over her shoulder and says, “Stay off the contraband and I’ll see you around, eh, Brave Strong Rory?”, he thinks, fervently: _And that as well_.

In the papers the next day, he reads about a shooting down in the city. The local force had been called down to help deal with it, the papers say, and they’d done the village proud by being instrumental in helping with the arrest, with the cleanup, with the saving of lives.

One officer, say the papers, Police Constable Amelia “Mia” Waters, was gunned down in the line of duty, taking a bullet for an unknown civilian.

Rory stops reading the papers after that. He can’t say exactly why, except that he gets the feeling they’ve betrayed him, and they make him feel, for a long time after, like he’s failedsomehow.

***

He stays off the contraband,  anyway, because it’s sensible advice. He makes some friends who, however wild they might be, actually study and seem to appreciate him, and that’s sensible too. He gets over _sweet_ the way he got over _shy_ , which is to say slowly, gradually and never quite fully, and _sensible_ seems to take over the space that it leaves. It is, in Rory’s mind, a sign that he’s growing up.

He takes his exams on three years of consistent hard work and three months of coffee-fueled mugging and gets good enough marks for a medical career. He chooses nursing because it’s a less intimidating option than surgery, and because it feels warmer and more caring and the tuition is cheaper. He moves to London for university and rents his own flat. He changes, more than he’d ever thought he’d change, and he starts to feel like he’s in control, he starts to feel bigger and smaller and older and younger all at the same time, he starts to feel like he’s finally living.

He starts to see her everywhere.

Red-haired Amie, his favourite barista down at the college coffee shop. A girl who’d served him at the perfume counter in Henrik’s on New Years’, green-eyed and freckled. His thesis supervisor. Women he passes in the streets, with bright hair or bright eyes or long legs or power.

_Any of them_ , he thinks, after all-nighters or graveyard student shifts at the hospital or when he’s just _tired_ of being sensible, all the time, always. _Any of them could be her_. _Any of them could be her, coming back._

He wonders, sometimes, alone in the dark, if he has somehow gone mad and has just been too sensible to notice.

 ***

On his twenty-first birthday, Rory’s friends hire him a kissogram.

They’d actually ordered him a stripper, but when they’d told him his face had gone so white and horrified that they feared he'd embarrass them all with a fit of righteously bewildered pontificating, and they’d  called the poor girl off and phoned for another, less explicit, one.

This is, for the record, not a decision he meets with any degree of enthusiasm, but at least he’d stopped spluttering eventually.

“Come on, Rory,” Jeff had said, tweaking his ear in a gesture Rory would’ve thought he’d grown out of when he’d turned six, “stop being such a prude. You need to live a little!”

“I’m sorry if looking at naked women isn’t exactly my idea of living,” said Rory, somewhat acidly, “but to each his own, I suppose.”

Jeff had laughed and clapped him on the back, entirely unoffended, and  given Mels the all-clear to call the agency.

She’d gone and picked the girl out herself, had Mels. She’s a bit of a wild one.

Rory spends the morning of his birthday memorizing the names of the bones in the human hand, and eating leftover birthday soufflé, courtesy of Mels’ roommate, who has pretty chocolate-brown eyes and a penchant for nicknaming people and probably the world’s most embarrassing name. He’d had a thing for her, briefly, and she’d flirted with him in the way of a friend who, when confronted with the possibility of taking things further, really wouldn’t mind either way, but her hair had been too brown and her manner too chirpy and anyway she’d had a nasty habit of calling him _Nina_.

He spends the afternoon of his birthday on a mandatory pub crawl with his friends, who, to be fair to them, have made a note of the early hour and the delicate nature of Rory’s nerves and spend the time mostly chatting and laughing and only really cajole him into downing one pint, okay, maybe three. Tops.

He spends the evening of his birthday sitting back in the living room of his flat waiting for the bell to ring, and rather dreading it, all things considered.

When the bell does ring, as it was always going to do, Rory’s personal preferences be damned, he sighs and rises and yanks the door open with the irritated determination to get the whole awful thing over with and –

And stops, mouth hanging open, completely frozen to the spot.

“You,” he says, and if it comes out as a squeak he will deny it to his dying day.

“Yes,” says the woman at the door, all long legs and hazel eyes and red hair and freckles across the nose, “me. Now pucker up, birthday boy.”

She grabs him by the collar and pulls him close, and as she kisses him Rory can feel his knees buckling. He has always hated his knees. This is, he reflects, unlikely to change at any point in the foreseeable future.

He will, however, have to reconsider his position on his lips.

“Oh,” says Rory, when he can breathe again, “oh. Um. Wow.”

He’d dreamed of kissing her, another her, in little guilty maddening dreams. On beaches, in the sunset, holding hands or curling close or pressing skin against skin under soft sheets, and he’d occasionally dreamed in Technicolor so vivid he can’t even think of it without turning pink. And yet, and yet – and yet. He – _wow._

The woman clears her throat, a small noise that sounds like satisfaction and slight discomfort and maybe even a little surprise. Her eyes are wide. “Well,” she says, ducking her head, straightening her vest, “you’re welcome.”

She is, Rory realizes, suddenly sober and really _looking_ , beautiful. Properly, truly beautiful. Gorgeous, yes, especially in that fake police uniform that should really, really not be as flattering as it is, but beyond that – there’s something in her eyes, in the way she stands, a kind of inner fire that is dangerous and admirable and enough to light a whole cavern full of darkness. Rory stares, for a long eternal moment, and realizes with a dreadful hallmark jolt that he’s in love with her. He’s always been in love with her.

She steps backwards, into the hall.

Rory’s heart stutters.

_Wait!_ screams a voice in Rory’s head, and also, rather more tetchily, _do something!_. And for all he tends to slide towards the 'flight or freeze' ends of the survival instinct spectrum, he’d learned long ago never to ignore annoyed little voices in one’s mind.

“I’ve loved you since I was five,” blurts Rory, and whatever it was that was shouting away in his head pauses to bury its face in its hands.

A silence, and then the woman turns and cocks her head slightly, staring at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, what?”

She’s watching him like she thinks he’s insane, and Rory wants to shrivel up inside his skin and curl up on the floor, unnoticed and unseen. Then again, _then again_ , she isn’t leaving yet.

“I meant,” says Rory, taking a step back into the flat and hoping it looks at least a little bit inviting, “would you, would you like to come in? I’ve… got cake. Well, actually it’s soufflé, but it’s pretty excellent.”

A small snort. “You’re sweet,” says the woman-who-was-at-the-door, leaning back into the hall, “but no, thanks.”

She turns and takes a step, but it’s a bit slower than Rory would have expected. Reluctant, maybe, or perhaps he’s just projecting, but it’s enough to make him step out after her, following.

“Won’t you at least tell me your name?” he calls, more pleading than he’d like, but she does stop and turn and it’s absolutely, it’s absolutely worth it.

“Amy,” she says, and smiles, a proper smile, a bit wry and a bit shy but radiant and sparking and utterly amazing, “Amy Pond.”

“Amy,” says Rory, and bites back the urge to say _Miss Pond_ as he rolls the name on his tongue, tasting, “come to dinner with me?”

A pause, and Rory forgets to breathe again, it’s a bit disgraceful for a man of his age and he really ought to write things like that down. _How to breathe in emergencies_. With any luck he’ll need it, often.

Amy takes a step, and another, but this time she walks towards him instead of away and it is so vastly preferable. She pulls a fake parking ticket pad from her waistband, scribbles something down and rips it off.

“Ask me again tomorrow,” she says, stuffing the ticket into Rory’s hand, and her eyes sparkle.

“Why tomorrow?” asks Rory, through the gaping, and Amy laughs and turns and walks away again, surefooted this time, and her steps are just a little bit lighter.

“Because tomorrow,” she says, calling over her shoulder, “I might say yes.”

Rory watches her for a moment after she’s gone, then turns, still stunned, to find his own front door shut and locked behind him. He opens his palm to find a number, scrawled in black ink in a too-familiar hand.

“Shit,” says Rory, with real feeling, though he can’t quite untangle the reasons why.

***

“You know, I just really wanted to tell you,” says Rory, over the phone, “that I really, _really_ hate you.”

Mels laughs, loud and long like a thunderstorm. “No, you don’t,” she says, and her grin is so smug it’s practically audible.

She’s still laughing as Rory hangs up.

***

“Do you believe in destiny?” Rory asks, over dessert, and Amy chokes on her crème brûlée.

“Um,” she says, coughing madly, and how, _how_ can she be coughing like that and have her face turn purple and still look so incredible? “Not particularly.”

“Okay,” says Rory, pouring a glass of water. Amy takes it with an appreciative nod.

There’s a lull as Amy drinks and sputters and tries to get her breathing under control. Rory averts his eyes, because he thinks she’d appreciate it, and gets in another spoonful of crème caramel before she speaks again.

“Why,” says Amy, sounding just barely mocking and genuinely curious, “do you?”

Rory takes another bite, considering. “Well,” he says, after a moment, as earnestly as he can, “how else could I explain meeting you?”

He looks up to catch her eye, meets her gaze with the sort of soulful intensity he learned from twenty-one years of watching romantic movies on the television. For a moment, it appears to be working, then Amy throws her head back and laughs so hard she nearly falls off her chair.

“Uh,” says Rory, eloquently, and resists the urge to wring his hands. “I’m sorry, did I say something…?”

“Corny,” finishes Amy, still laughing, “and a little bit creepy. But generally sweet, so on balance you’re fine.”

“Oh,” Rory says, and flushes crimson. “Alright.”

They finish their dessert in relative silence, but Amy keeps grinning at him like they’re sharing a joke and it’s, it’s the best feeling in the world.

After, Rory takes her to a nearby fairground, and they laugh some more and eat lots of cotton candy and then Amy grabs his hand, almost instinctively, and that is _better_.

***

He drags her to a fortune teller. It feels odd when they have to untangle their fingers from each other so the lady can get a look at their palms, and it feels a little like a loss, almost karmic. Rory wonders.

He doesn’t hear what sort of fortune Amy gets, but it makes her laugh, and then he’s being beckoned into the tent by a woman with a scarf tied around her head, and she traces his love line with a wrinkled finger.

“You are,” says the fortune teller, “a very lucky young man.”

_Tell me something I don_ _’t know_ , thinks Rory, but he’s too polite to say.


	2. Chapter 2

 “Ghost hunting,” mutters Rory, giving his foot an experimental wiggle. It’s jammed fairly securely between a pair of iron bars for traction, but he’s not entirely convinced that the grip of a couple of bars on his trainers will be enough to hoist him over gates that are eight feet high and covered in ornamental ironwork roses. “This is _trespassing_ , Amy.”

A snort from somewhere below his left shoe. Whether it’s annoyed or amused, Rory can’t quite tell.

“Aw, bless,” says Amy, with more than a little condescension. “Do you need me to give you a boost up?”

Rory looks down at her balefully, clinging to a rosebud by his fingertips. Amy giggles. Rory sighs, and if he were any more put-upon he’d be a coaster. “No,” he says, and gets to climbing, “I’m fine, thanks.”

He clears the fence with a set of very bruised fingers but without impaling anything delicate on the spikes on the top, thank goodness. Amy joins him about a minute later, grinning like a loon.

“Come on,” she says, grabbing his hand and dragging him up the front steps. She digs through her purse with her free hand, dislodging a pocket torch and a lock-picking kit and a box full of bobby pins, and Rory can feel his eyes popping out of his head.

“Aren’t you meant to be a policewoman?” he asks. Amy lets go of his hand.

It is true, Rory knows, that one generally needs both hands to pick a lock. It is also true that he has an unfortunate tendency to read too much into things.

Still, there is a discomfort to the silence and the sound of the tumblers clicking, too-loud in the still air. There is an anger to the twists of Amy’s long thin beautiful fingers, black pin biting hard into her pale thumb. Rory watches and gnaws at his lip and wonders what he’s done wrong.

The lock clicks. “Result!” crows Amy, and beams, and doesn’t meet Rory’s eyes. She kicks the door open with the toe of her boot, theatrical bang and all.

“Amy?” says Rory, like it will call her back to him, like she’s gone somewhere away. She shoots him a look, the tiniest sliver of a smile.

“Wrong ghosts,” Amy says, and steps, alone, into the twilit hall.        

***

The house does feel haunted, all peeling wallpaper and thick air and dusty chandeliers. If there are ghosts here, they’re in the grime on the windows, hiding and dancing with all the shadows. It’s dark; the light’s like soup. Amy’s eyes are bright as her torch.

“You’re beautiful,” breathes Rory, and Amy laughs.

“Shut up,” she says, “you can’t really see me.”

***

“Yeah,” breathes Amy, wiping cobwebs off an elegantly horrifying stone angel in the back garden, “ _much_ better than a rubbish movie.”

Rory taps the angel on the forehead with a fingertip in what he hopes is an appreciative manner. It gives him the creeps.

“Yup,” he says, sounding sufficiently dubious. “Better.”

He looks over at Amy, so alive in this garden full of dead things. Hands twined in vines of ivy, cheeks pinking in the wind. He wishes he could understand her. He’d give anything to understand her. He loves her so much.

She turns, suddenly, to face him. Rory starts, and her gaze is so blazing he starts to wish she were still staring at the angel. He’d feel much safer, if she were.

“Much cheaper, too,” Rory adds, faking nonchalance. He’s not faking it very well. His throat’s dry.

“It really was rubbish,” says Amy, over him, and there’s a violence to her voice that makes Rory’s stomach not so much twist as attempt to make a bid for freedom. “All that ‘love at first sight’ rot.”

“It’s rot?” Rory asks and, yeah, maybe that did come out a bit quickly.

He wishes the garden were less littered with dead leaves and debris. He’d much rather have this conversation sitting down.

“Yeah,” says Amy, and now she looks more bemused than anything, like this ought to be obvious. “You do know there’s no such thing.”

Rory gapes at her for a minute, his sort-of girlfriend and utter love of his life, standing straight-backed and dusty-fingered in the ruins of someone else’s property like some kind of fairytale hero, and tries to come up with a response more eloquent than _what, really, since when?_

“Um,” says Rory. “Well.”

Amy sighs, deep and frustrated, and takes a step towards him. It’s more intimidating than it probably should be.

“Look,” says Amy, forcefully, earnestly, “there’s no such thing as love at first sight. There’s _like_ at first sight, yeah, and, I don’t know, ‘I really fancy you’ at first sight and there is _absolutely_ such a thing as ‘I want to shag your brains out’ at first sight,” with a lecherous smile that makes Rory shiver.

“But,” she says, and she takes a deep breath, and her smile drops away. “Love is – is. Oh, I don’t _know_ , it‘s not like I’m some kind of expert, or anything. But you can’t fall in love with someone you don’t _know_. That’s just stupid.”

A wind blows in, rough and wet and cold, and it rips handfuls of leaves from the near-barren trees. They swirl to the ground, making little whirlpools, little orbits around some unknown centre. _Leaves_ , thinks Rory, irrationally, _leaves know themselves. They know why they fall. They have their own gravity_.

Rory bites his lip.

“Yeah,” he says, “you’re completely right.”

“You are,” he says, “completely brilliant.”

 _You_ , he thinks, _have your own gravity_.

“Thanks,” Amy says, shortly, and goes back to studying the statue.

***

He should, he thinks, be studying her. He should be cataloguing every movement, learning every tic, decoding every lift of the eyebrow, every nuance of intonation, every shift in her smile. He should be stalking her on Facebook and googling her friends and asking Mels for some favours she would no doubt mock him for forever.

He won’t. He doesn’t have to. He knows her. He knows.

***

“Four psychiatrists,” says Amy, swinging her legs. She sounds rather proud of it, really. Rory gapes at her.

“ _Four?_ ” he asks, and wishes he had the class to sound less ...well, less. “Why?”

Her heels bang against the doors of Rory’s car, _bump bump bump_. He tries not to think about what she’s doing to his paintwork.

“I kept biting them,” Amy says, and, yes, she's definitely smug. Her left heel clips the driver’s window. Rory tries not to wince.

There’s a lull, broken only by the bump of Amy’s trainers against metal, and then her smile fades and she sighs, one of those deep deflating sighs. Rory looks up at her and braces himself.

“They wanted to fix me,” declares Amy, with a shrug. “They wanted to have me all – figured out, what was wrong with me, all that rubbish. So I bit them. It was – it was fun.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” says Rory, without pause. What would he pause for? “You’re perfect.” 

Amy shoots him a look, wary, disbelieving. Her voice had felt enough to crack but it had been flip, comfortable, in control. She looks vulnerable, now, soft and confused, almost betrayed.

“Yeah,” she says, after a moment, and leans languidly across the roof of Rory’s car. “You go on thinking that. Good a theory as any.”

If it feels like condemnation, Rory cannot explain why.

***

“I love you,” says Rory, softly, like he’s half-hoping she won’t hear. Amy jerks the car to a halt two inches past a red stoplight and slides him a look, half smirk and half smile, soft-sad.

“Oh, really?” she says, and there’s something laughing in her voice, and something slightly strangled. “Why?”

***      

“I’m sorry,” says Rory, digging through his wallet with growing desperation. It’s raining buckets onto the street, wind whipping around like a displaced monsoon, and they’re huddled under an awning that seems ready to cave in at any moment and Rory hasn’t, all of a sudden, got any money for a cab. “I could’ve sworn I still had –“

“About twenty pounds,” Amy says, and Rory jerks his head up to look at her so quickly it gives him whiplash. “I know. I gave it to that homeless guy, over there, down the end of the street,” and she points out into the storm that’s gotten so blinding Rory can’t see past her finger. For all he knows, there is no homeless man, and no end of the street for that matter. Just the two of them, and the drippy awning, and the endless rain around trapping him with the woman he’s utterly, madly in love with and who has apparently just pickpocketed him of the last of his Emergency Spending Money.

The absurdity of it is striking.

“Well,” Rory tries, sounding vaguely hysterical, “I. I suppose he must’ve… needed it.”

He waves his arms about, helplessly, and his empty wallet flaps pathetically in his left hand. Amy looks at him with a furrowed brow and a wrinkled nose, and he realizes that for once he has no idea what this is supposed to mean.

“Nah,” says Amy, as flippantly as she can manage, “he’ll probably spend the lot on booze. And now we’re stuck here, or maybe we’ll have to walk home. Won’t that be fun, Rory?”

Her gaze is level, challenging, and it makes something in Rory shiver with something like fear. “It’s not so bad, being stuck here,” he says, lamely, “with you.”

Amy narrows her eyes, and for a moment Rory thinks she’s squinting out into the storm, but no, she’s still looking at him. Studying him. Thunder crashes overhead and Amy gives a little growl of frustration, and both sounds are terrifying but the second one is more so, more threatening, _more_.

“Doesn’t it make you angry?” snaps Amy, something raw and wild in her voice, “Not even a little? I just _stole your money_ and got us stuck in the middle of a _hurricane_ and you’re not even just a little bit upset? How pathetic _are_ you, anyway?”

And it does, Rory realizes, all of a sudden, lightning-sudden, it _does_ make him angry. More than a little bit, and he feels it washing over him, like a rainstorm, like a flood. Not about the money or the sealing or the rain – and, honestly, how can he not find that just a _little_ bit sexy? – or even about the way she’s talking, the things she’s saying that are sharp enough to cut. He’s angry because of the look on her face, the glint in her eye, like she wants to run away. Like she wants _him_ to.

She should’ve learned by now, Rory thinks. She should have learned that that’s never going to happen.

“Why are you doing this?” Rory snaps back, and if he startles Amy she doesn’t show it. “Why are you pushing me away?”

Something in Amy’s eyes flashes, all steel and spark. “Because I’m just a kissogram, Rory,” she says, and it sounds like an accusation and like a plea, so full of hurt and frustration it's breaking his heart. “I’m just a girl with no uni education and basically no future prospects who lives in a stupid poky flat after finally getting out of a tiny village she spent her whole life trying to leave, and yes, I _am_ smart and strong and gorgeous but in the end, in the end, Rory, I’m just a _girl_. It wasn’t destiny that you met me. It was your crazy friend Mels. And you’re looking at me, you keep – _looking_ at me, like you’re looking for something else, someone special and perfect and _impossible_ and all I am is _this_.”

Lightning flashes, when she’s finished, and Rory can’t tell if it’s real or just the shock of it, of all of it, lighting up his behind his eyes. He gapes at her like he had when they first met, all those times, and he doesn’t, he doesn’t know what to say.

“You’re not,” says Rory, choked and pleading, and he can, he will make her understand. “You’re, you’re not. You’re _more_ than that.”

“What,” snaps Amy, and this time she steps back and away and when her eyes flash again it isn’t light, it isn’t fire, it isn’t anything but anger, “is that not enough?”

She is a mad girl, his Amy, and she isn’t afraid of a little rain, not her. She isn’t afraid of anything. She walks out into the storm and she is brighter, louder, fiercer, and her steps echo on the wet pavement over the sound of the thunder.

Rory calls for her, safe and shivering under his leaking shelter, but she doesn’t turn around.

***

Rory is drenched when he finally gets back to his flat, dripping on the tile and leaving muddy footprints on the carpet. He doesn’t go and curl up in a corner and wail like the maudlin bit of him wants to, but this is less because he’s relatively unaffected and more because the responsible-nurse part of him is yelling at him to take a hot shower and change before he catches hypothermia.

He settles, after, on the floor of his bedroom, changed into dry clean pyjamas and clutching a mug of cocoa. He takes a fortifying sip. He takes a number of deep breaths. Then he reaches under his bed and pulls out a pair of shoeboxes, battered with age but otherwise kept pristine.

He lifts off the lids and sifts through the contents for hours, papers shuffling and plastic crackling, and he breathes, slowly and deeply, and says goodbye. It takes time.

When he’s finished, the rain outside has stopped. Rory pulls on a pair of jeans and tucks the boxes under his arm and goes.

***

Amy answers the door with barely-pink eyes and bare feet and a scowl.

“You didn’t bring flowers, did you?” she says, eyeing Rory’s boxes suspiciously, “because I don’t think flowers are going to cut it.”

“No,” says Rory, and resists the urge to shuffle nervously. “I didn’t. Can I come in?”

Amy turns and walks inside and doesn’t reply, but she leaves the door open. Rory will take what he can get.   

“Look,” says Rory, and then stops, takes a few tentative steps towards Amy’s battered paisley sofa. It’s probably meant to be a joke, the paisley. That or it was cheaper. “Can I – “

Amy nods, tersely, and as Rory settles down on the spongy cushions she comes closer, stands over him, arms crossed. “Well?”

Rory pauses, looks up at her. Her hair is a mess, falling in ragged still-damp waves over her strong shoulders, and her eyes are oddly wet but determinedly not wide or sad or searching, and she’s biting down on her lip so hard it’s turning a little bit white, and Rory can’t, he can’t –

He puts his boxes down on the coffee table, lifts the lids off. “I have to show you something,” he says, and lifts out the first stack.

Homework assignments, little wobbling alphabets traced with earnest childish precision onto lined and dotted paper, graded in a familiar hand with little smiley faces on. Photographs, a little boy in short pants and a beautiful young woman with red hair smiling for a camera with pastel walls and scrawling drawings in the background. A news report, short and sharp and brutal, detailing a car crash, an urban shooting. A printed list of employees from a number of police stations, kindergartens, coffee houses, circled and underlined like someone had been looking for something they hadn’t found. Napkins. Magazine clippings. Obituaries. And on the top, just a little out of place, a fake parking ticket with a phone number scrawled on in black ink.

Amy sinks down onto the couch, oddly and wonderfully close, lips parted and pale. “What,” she says, and her voice is a little high, a little breathy, and for once she doesn’t clear her throat to cover it. “What is this?”

“When we first met, I told you, I said, ‘I’ve loved you since I was five’,” says Rory, and he looks up at her, at this woman he loves, because it is terrifying but he wouldn’t be able to say this if he were looking anywhere else.  

“When I was little, see,” he continues, before he can lose his nerve, “I had this kindergarten teacher,” and then he tells her. He tells her everything.

Amy’s eyes are wide as Rory’s ever seen them, when he finishes, and her knuckles are white, and he finds he’s terrified, even more than he’s always, always terrified, that she’s about to run away. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you,” he says, and sighs, but he can’t bring himself to look away.

“Yes,” says Amy, faraway, and then blinks, hard. “Yeah. Look, Rory – “

“No, wait,” says Rory, “wait, look, I’m not expecting you to take this as some – some huge, epic love story, or anything like that. Because it’s not. It’s more than a little creepy and completely insane and it isn’t, well.”

 _Isn_ _’t sweet_ , he thinks, _isn_ _’t strong, isn_ _’t sensible, isn_ _’t any of the things I am or any of the things I think you made me_.

 _And how_ , thinks Rory, with no small amount of shame, _how could I be disappointed that you weren_ _’t any of the things I_ _’d made of you?_

Amy watches him, eyes still saucer-wide, unblinking. “I’m listening,” she says, soft and guarded, and it’s a challenge and a gift, it’s so true.

“The thing is, Amy,” says Rory, and his exhale is not so much a sigh as a release, a rally, making him brave like he always should have been, “the thing is, I’ve fallen completely in love with you. And I think that’s more down to who I thought you ought to be than who you really are. And that’s – that’s not who I want to be, and it isn’t fair to you, and I am so, so very sorry.”

He drops his gaze, finally, and stares at Amy’s hands instead. They’re slim and pale and long-fingered and so much like the hands that had patched up his scabby knees and plucked a crippling lack of self-confidence from his trembling fingers and haunted his dreams, but they’re callused from climbing gates and picking locks, marked up in black sharpie, clenching from the things he’s been saying, and Rory knows, he knows that the sweet strong brave sensible person he thought had fallen in love with her ought to have noticed that a long time back.

He looks back up, and for the first he thinks he can, really and truly, meet her eyes.

"And I think you’re wonderful,” he says, and for the first time he knows exactly what he is saying. “I think you’re brilliant. And I’ve decided, I don’t want – I don't want them. I don’t want those ghosts, I want, I want _you_. I want _you_ , Amy Pond. I want to know you. I want to fall in love with _you_.”

Amy stares, and says nothing, and for the longest, longest moment Rory cannot breathe.

“Properly, this time,” adds Rory, with a small uncomfortable shrug. “With, you know, proper conversation. Proper dates. I could think of proper dates, I think, if you don’t throw me out right now and have me committed, which, I mean, would be completely justified.”

He sticks out his hand and smiles, a bit awkwardly. He waits. He’s good at waiting, is Rory.

Amy’s hand is cold when it closes over his, but it is, as it has always been, it always will be the best thing in the world.

And then she smiles, small and shy and real, and then it grows into a grin, then a laugh, all surprise and delight, and it blazes and roars across her face until she is entirely alight. Rory laughs, then, hysterically, like he’d had something sitting on his chest his whole life and it’d just grown wings and flown away, like he’d just cut something malignant out of his body, like he has nothing else better to do.

“Mad Rory,” says Amy, almost wondering, “You _are_. You’re even madder than I am.”

“Maybe,” Rory says, and laughs some more, but then again maybe he isn’t. He’d let her ghosts define him, before. He’d let himself think he could define her. He’s learned, now. Now, they’ll both have to define themselves.

He squeezes her hand. It feels solid in his. Real.

“There’s a barbeque pit downstairs,” says Amy, with a wicked glint in her eye. “And I think I’ve got some marshmallows in the pantry.”

Rory looks at her, at her smiling face, and he knows what she’s asking. Not so long ago, it would have been impossible for him to give it. But then again she has always been impossible, and he has always loved her anyway.

“Alright,” says Rory, “let’s go,” and he scoops everything up into his arms and for the first time he doesn’t care if any of it crumples, and then they laugh down the stairs and roast marshmallows over a blazing fire. Ghosts, it seems, make very good kindling.

Later, fingers sticky and eyes bright, Amy asks, “Who were they, though, all spread through your life like that? How’d they get there?”

Her tone is curious, and her gaze is drifting, again, musing but not hiding. Rory smiles, and thinks, as if he hadn’t already spent most of his life wondering.

“Destiny,” he says, and shrugs, just to hear her laugh. “I don’t know.”

“Does it matter?” asks Amy, and her gaze is focussed again, all of a sudden, boring into him. Rory returns it and doesn’t flinch, and it’s easier than it’s ever been.

“Why should it?” he asks, and Amy smiles, and if it isn’t the truth, decides Rory, watching the ash float up to the sky, it will be.

***

Later, much later, years later, perhaps, Rory wakes in the warm dawn sunlight and looks down at the woman in his arms, her features peaceful in sleep and sunshine sparking off her hair so she looks like a fire, like a lion, and he kisses her so she’s smiling when her eyes finally open.

“Amy,” he murmurs, full of wonder, into the curve of her ear, “you’re Amy,” and Amy smiles, soft and languid.

“I am,” says Amy, sleepy-fond, over small laughter.

And Rory pulls her closer, feels the warmth of her, and his heart swells so much he cannot feel anything but it, beating away in the space between them.

“I love you,” he says, and it is completely, completely true. “I love _you_.”

“I know,”  Amy murmurs, and snuggles closer. “I know.”


End file.
